after breakfast on saturday we headed straight off to the lottie (allotment) to discover that the wet weather had not only prodded the potatoes into rampant growth, but the dreaded weeds, too. so, it was a case of on your knees and get picking, girl.
i have to say it was a bit disheartening. we have a nasty weed called mare's tail and we know it's going to be troublesome. but when we first started on the allotment, before even thinking about sowing, we turned over the soil in minute detail and pulled every visible weed up at the roots. so, really, we hadn't expected to see them come back in such wanton profusion. anyway. the next issue is that we can't dig them up where tiny baby seedlings are coming through, as the root movement will displace the young plants. so we just have to tough it out for a while. to add insult to injury, they're looking to seed, so if we don't get rid of them soon they'll spread everywhere and not only will we have a hundred more of the blighters but our lottie neighbours will be most displeased with us.
we spent saturday afternoon making scarecrows. we're under no illusions that they will be especially effective against streetwise london pigeons, but they might be enough to keep the odd crow off our spuds. they're made from sticks of bamboo made into crosses then old CDs (mostly booyaa's old linux format freebies) hanging off the cross arms. they glitter quite nicely in the breeze.
we put some netting over the raspberries, but it didn't really work, so that was revisited on sunday. we used more bamboo to make three hurdles and slotted a long pole over the top. then we tied two lines of netting together to make it wide enough, threw it over the bamboo hurdles and pegged it down furiously. i'd seen 'strawberry man' painstakingly make a big frame with netting and meticulously pin it down to cover his stunning crop of strawbs, only to see a pigeon strut round the frame and find the tiniest gap to get through. doh! so we were oh so very careful.
booyaa went mulchtastic with some rotted leaves that had been abandoned in the car park and we've covered the pathways with a mix of the rotted leaves and some shop-bought bark. we're talking about turfing part of the plot, but that's the 'recreational' area so it will stay that way. there's not much point splashing out on turf for the main part of the garden, as we'll undoubtedly be digging up, flattening and rejigging beds for next year. we're learning already about what we don't like and there will be plenty of changes.
here are three big things i've learnt.
1. prepare the ground really well before you put anything in. you can't go back and level it or rake it or tidy up the edges once seeds or seedlings are in. don't rush. a week's not that much to wait if it means the difference between a well-prepared bed and a bumpy, lumpy, wonky one.
2. don't use soil to pot up seeds, you'll only regret it. if needs be, wait till next week when you've got some compost (you can tell i'm learning the hard way on this one.) you can't tell what's a weed and what's a seedling and it's infuriating.
3. even if it says to sow seeds straight into the earth i definitely recommend sowing in seed trays first, for the same reasons as in 2. you can't tell where they are and it's hard to weed around them until the first true leaves have come up and you can recognise them. or at least distinguish them from the zillion weeds.
another thing we've learned is that wilkinson's are extremely cheap for gardening supplies and have a really good range of stuff. they have a full range of very nice, old-fashioned wood-handled and stainless steel spades/forks etc for much less than we paid for B&Qs plasticky mid-range stuff. most disappointing. well. now we know.
the shed, which booyaa and my dad (aka king arthur) sorted out over the bank holiday weekend, is fabulous. it's gone from a rickety, flimsy, dingy space to throw tools on the floor of, to a stable and almost nice place to be. we've got shelves, including a dropleaf deep shelf for a potting table, lots of hooks everywhere for tools, clothes, lunch bag... and now the weather's less likely to be wet for days on end i've taken the plunge and left my gardening shorts and shoes in the shed. though i still had black nails and my hair was a windswept tangle, getting on the bus in clean trousers and sandals rather than filthy jeans and mud-caked trainers was such a relief today.
we put up a rather lovely willow trellis on the side of the shed. i know i could have used netting or string and saved some money, but i do want the place to look pretty if at all possible. today, sunday, i planted out three sweet pea plants and there are some seeds, peas in fact, planted straight into the ground too, so that will look lovely once they're established and climbing up the trellis.
the mini greenhouse is amazingly useful. it's got four wire shelves (great for watering - the excess just drips through to water the shelf below) and a sturdy polythene cover with a zip door. it's absolutely chock full of seedlings and i can't wait for them to grow so i can get them out there in the ground. most of the seeds go straight into plastic food pots or into cardboard tubes (cut up loo/kitchen roll innards) and then on a tray. cardboard tubes are useful because you can write the plant name and planted date directly on it with a biro so if they all get mixed up you can still identify them.
besides all the veg in the greenhouse, we have half a dozen types of herb growing in the heated propagator at home. they'll be potted on and taken to the allotment where they will stay in pots and be semi-sunk around the border. they'll be strategically placed to keep pests away but will also be eaten :)
and that's us all caught up for now.
lots of photos of all this on booyaa's flickr account.
